NWN2 - The Black Hound Interview @ GameBanshee

February 14th, 2007, 02:15

GameBanshee has a great interview with Josh Sawyer on his NWN2 project The Black Hound, with a little bit of introductory background on The Black Hound / Baldur&#39;s Gate 3 / Jefferson when it was in development at Interplay. There&#39;s a lot of interesting stuff but let&#39;s start with an overview:

GB: What is the premise surrounding The Black Hound? What will the overall objective be for the player and what areas of the Forgotten Realms will we travel through along the way?

Josh: The Black Hound catches the central character in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case, the wrong place is south of White Ford, Archendale and the wrong time is the night when a woman tracks down and kills a black hound. The protagonist is a witness to this strange event and becomes entangled with the woman, May Farrow, through association. Many people and groups want information on May and they believe that the protagonist can help them get what they want.

The player has a pretty broad long-term goal: find May Farrow and deal with her. This can be accomplished with or without factions in the area and it can be accomplished by helping or hindering May in various ways. There are also numerous side stories and faction plotlines that have nothing to do with May Farrow&#39;s plot directly. Over the course of the game, the protagonist is likely to visit many points of interest in Archendale, Deepingdale, and Battledale. For the Realms-impaired, these are three of the southernmost regions of the Dalelands. They sit north of Sembia, southwest of the Moonsea, and northeast of Cormyr.

This mod looks really promising, especially the part where he says
that he'd rather not it make it a Premium module, since it it going to be
more darker and the characters are made for a module which pushed the
boundaries of the T-rating.

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm pleased that the project is alive in some form, but I wish it was going to be a commercial product. As of now, I can't think of a single commercial D&D RPG in development. With just one guy working on it in what is probably very little spare time, it will probably take a very long time to finish.

Let me clarify that — I can't think of a legitimate D&D game in development that isn't going to be some spinoff. Yeah, I'm sure Atari is hard at work pushing the next RTS or button mashing console game, but another party-based PC adventure that's actually based on the rules set? Forget it.

Originally Posted by Lethal Weapon
Some of the best releases last year were mods, Ultima Lazarous for Dungeon Siege and Darkness over Daggerford for NWN were both 10 times better than the original games.

More than anything, that speaks loudly for how shitty commerical single player PC RPG releases have been since the original NWN came out. Daggerford was pretty good but it came out over four years after the original game.